Death by Delay

“The difference between taking a part of my life,
and taking my whole life, is just a matter of degree.” –Anon

There was a time, before the baby-boom generation took over, when we took pride in the achievements of our builders, producers and innovators. There was always great celebration when settler families got a phone, a tractor, a bitumen road or electric power. An oil strike or a gold discovery made headlines, and people welcomed new businesses, new railways and new inventions. Science and engineering were revered and the wealth delivered by these human achievements enabled the builders and their children to live more rewarding lives, with more leisure, more time for culture and crusades, and greater interest in taking more care of their environment.

Then a green snake entered the Garden of Eden.

Many of the genuine conservationists from the original environmental societies were replaced by political extremists who felt lost after the Comrade Societies collapsed and China joined the trading world. These zealots were mainly interested in promoting environmental alarms in order to push a consistent agenda of world control of production, distribution and exchange – a new global utopia run by unelected all-knowing people just like them.

The old Reds became the new Greens.

They used every credible-sounding scare to recruit support – peak resources, acid rain, ozone holes, global cooling, species extinction, food security, Barrier Reef threats, global warming or extreme weather to justify global controls, no-go areas and international taxes to limit all human activities. However the public became disenchanted with their politics of denial, and their opposition to human progress, so they have adopted a new tactic – death by delay.

“We are not opposed to all development, but we want to ensure all environmental concerns are fully investigated before new developments get approval.”

In fact, their goal is to kill projects with costly regulations, investigations and delay. Their technique is to grab control of bureaucratic bodies like the US EPA which, since 2009, has issued 2,827 new regulations totalling 24,915,000 words. A current example of death by delay is the Keystone Oil pipeline proposal which would have taken crude oil from Alberta in Canada to refineries on the US Gulf Coast – far better than sending it by rail tankers. It was first proposed in 2005, and immediately opposed by the anti-industry, anti-carbon zealots who control the EPA and other arms of the US federal government. The proposal was studied to death by US officials and green busybodies for nine long years.

This week the Canadians lost patience and approved an alternative proposal to take a pipeline to the west coast of Canada, allowing more Albertan oil to be exported to Asia. Jobs and resources that would have benefitted Americans will now go to Asia. Naturally the Green delayers will also attempt to throttle this proposal. Over in Europe, shale gas exploration is also being subject to death by delay. In Britain, the pioneering company, Caudrilla, has been waiting for seven long years for approvals to explore. In France, all such exploration is banned.

No wonder India recently accused Greenpeace and other delayers of being “a threat to national economic security”.

Viv Forbes is a geologist , financial analyst and farmer with a degree in Applied Science (geology, physics, chemistry and maths). Since graduation he has studied economics, politics, climatology, soil science, financial analysis, grazing management, hydrology and animal nutrition. He has worked for government departments, private companies and his own business. He has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and was chosen as Friedrich Naumann Foundation's "Author of Freedom" in September 2012. He should be retired but is a non-executive director of a small Australian coal exploration company and lives with his wife Judy on their sheep and cattle breeding property at Rosevale in Queensland, Australia. He was the founder of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Mr. Forbes, Your major gripe, by the sounds of it, is the shift of American society and government, through regulatory action, away from rubber-stamping the adoption of energy and food production techniques as ‘safe’ until ‘proven dangerous’.

Many other ‘developed’ countries take note of the United States’ rising healthcare costs and standing as the only country in which the poorest are the most obese, as a signal to be skeptical about unproven food production techniques.

I’m guessing by your background that you believe in some degree of anthropomorphic climate change. In this understanding, I wonder why energy production (and say, frack fluid storage claiming to be safe for 1000’s of years, and pipeline construction over our nations largest aquifers) would not warrant the cautionary approach you berate? What’s the hurry? We’ve got hundreds of thousands of years of posterity to consider. Is the urgent need to provide America’s structurally unemployed truly the impetus to rush decisions impacting the next 100 generations? Sounds like a scare tactic to recruit support…–‘Death by Delay’, or ‘Life by taking time to examine patterns’?